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Chapter 5 - A’s Religion of Boredom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2023

Ryan S. Kemp
Affiliation:
Wheaton College, Illinois
Walter Wietzke
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, River Falls
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Summary

I argue that “The Rotation of Crops” represents one of two culminations of the aesthete’s (i.e., “A’s”) position in Either/Or. Under the guise of his bantering remarks, A sketches a theory of the modern self as specifically constituted in relation to the problem of boredom: To be modern is to be bored and to be motivated by the desire not to be bored. A’s boredom is thus in some sense an experience of ultimate significance, a religious experience imminent within the terms of the secular life itself. A’s solution to the problem of boredom turns out therefore to require a wholesale conversion; the cure is nothing short of a totalizing spiritual practice that one must make the center of one’s life, if one hopes to keep things interesting. A’s position amounts at once to a transcendental critique and to a theology of boredom.

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Kierkegaard's Either/Or
A Critical Guide
, pp. 79 - 97
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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